Embodied Family Choreography

Reviews / Votes

"More than a book, Embodied Family Choreography offers a multi-media, stop-motion view of how touch, gaze, and language entangle parents and children in comforting attunement and struggles for control. This landmark study brings theory to its knees, as it distills the experience of living, learning, and building intimacy with others." - Elinor Ochs, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, UCLA, USA

"Embodied Family Choreography is an immensely dense web of vignettes of truly mundane family life: brushing teeth, saying good night, sheperding the children to their bedroom. Each scene is analyzed so as to brilliantly reveal the multiple ecological, socio-historical, relational, and semiotic practices and constraints shaping it, and the interactional 'machinery' by which patterns of close relationships and personalities are formed comes into clear relief. Rarely has family life been presented with so much vivid precision and depth of observation." - Juergen Streeck, The University of Texas at Austin, USA

"Exploring the rich life of American and Swedish families, their routines and their creative improvisations, Marjorie Goodwin and Asta Cekaite offer a fascinating book that both revisits classical interactional topics - like directives in social interaction - and introduces innovative perspectives - especially regarding tactility and embodiment in everyday practices. That the multiple uses of touch are not only for care and intimacy, but for controlling and socializing bodies represents a strong originality of the book." - Lorenza Mondada, University of Basel, Switzerland

"In Embodied Family Choreography, Goodwin and Cekaite provide an in-depth view into everyday family life in the United States and Sweden. In doing so, they turn what they call "the mundane" into anything but, showing how the kinds of ordinary activities and practices that constitute "doing" being a family (like bedtime routines and managing homework) are densely packed opportunities for researchers to understand many of the core features of cultural experience that concern psychological anthropologists." - Sonya E. Pritzker, Ethos

"Marjorie H. (Candy) Goodwin and Asta Cekaite's analysis of interactions between parents and children in daily life provides an excellent contribution that will extend the discussion [on multimodality and (inter)sensoriality in Conversation Analysis], and it does so from a more than cursory interdisciplinary perspective. [...] [It] provides an outstanding possibility to see in detail how parent-child or sibling-sibling interactions take place, especially as embodied, haptic, spatially occurring routines that are calibrated in situ. It combines in one edition the two authors' research into child rearing, and especially the role of intercorporeality (touches and hugs). The book is a goldmine of close to 200 exemplary analyses and a wealth of themes (with a thorough set of references to the literature) that pertain to family interactions." - Pirkko Raudaskoski, Journal of Pragmatics